I Feel A Song Coming On

Since this isn’t a review, I think it’s OK for me to tell you some things about myself, not that I will reveal much. That is, if everything should work out, I won’t be hiding or pretending, but I won’t be telling you anything more than Nate Pritts, who names himself here and there in his book, is telling us anything about himself. Besides, what are we beyond what happens to us? Is there a child born in these pages? A marriage allowed to spoil, then molder? An abandonment, hitchhiking into irresponsibility? Bad faith and friendships broken by the blunt ax-edge of passing time? Sure; maybe. And this is one of the reasons why I want you to read Big Bright Sun, so you too can squint into the realizations that stream out, center and edge, from these poems.

They sing, the poems in Big Bright Sun, and they sing in such a way that you might imagine someone singing along. Rising and falling in them all feathery with soft blacks, withdrawn, a Cure fan and true believer in operatic Disintegration mope. Only occasionally slipping hits of Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me ecstasy, even though those indulgences aren’t easy to admit to, much less confess. There are exclamation marks blossoming everywhere in Big Bright Sun, and affirmations embracing their own vulnerability. I never doubt this person, or his voice, even in its “awesome!”-ness, or take his excitements for ironies. This is delight, being absolved from cringing at escape pods and deflector shields borrowed from Star Wars and lines like these:

as if the past was something
that just happened yesterday & the future

will be something like a tin saucer landing in your front yard.

I can smile at lines like those and mean it. Which is not to say Big Bright Sun is a book defined by ease. Work has a place in these pages. I mean, I can say that I like Big Bright Sun because, in trusting, page by page, that I will like whatever I read next in it, I find in me someone who is capable of such enjoyment . . . not untrammeled, certainly not unadulterated, sometimes even ragged and wraith-like, but nevertheless a person who can admit “I can.”

So, yes, there’s happiness in the book, but much of the time, that happiness assumes the form of some haunting. Is happiness really just an intense desire to be happy? Could it be that happiness has an accomplice in nostalgia, that longing for moods that were once more intense, that broken if healing recall not of any specific feeling, but the capacity to feel at all? One poem in Big Bright Sun is entitled “Monday, Monday,” and cycles, line by line, though an entire year of what might be beginnings but speak more in the language of false starts. “Monday, Monday”‘s form is a kind of whimsy, but the words themselves are sad, sometimes even desperate. Inside this charm is heartbreak, and you don’t even have to crack the former open to find the latter.

July

3.

I make a sandwich. I drink grape juice. I peel an orange.

10.

Today I am a lute in a window & there is no breeze.

17.

Today I am a window with a lute in it. No breeze.

24.

I am a breeze not blowing: over there: a window, a lute.

31.

I peel an orange. I eat.

Is this a chronicle? What are we peering into? Maybe you can read these as letters, open but one-sided. Or postcards (which hardly anyone remembers), chatty but also somehow abrupt, in the way people who are moving on often must be. The someone singing all over Big Bright Sun is tracking and covering a specific distance, a distance that looks like hope, that weird blend of expectation and endurance. If Big Bright Sun has a refrain, I have to paraphrase it: “This is how far I am from being the person I want to be.”

Big Bright Sun is also making notes for a map. A map whose meridians and isotherms and orthogonals all point to how achingly between becoming is. Becoming hurts, but becoming doesn’t suck. I mean, becoming is too elastic, too organic — which is maybe another way of saying “necessary” — to bend back on itself to the point where it breaks. Yet there’s no way becoming doesn’t accelerate as you grow older. The poems here understand so much about aging, and they act out that understanding on our behalf. (There are selves who long pre-date us who believed the sun would not take its diurnal course unless impelled by sacrifice.)

The sun, for instance, is a big idea.
A big, doomed idea. It burns itself out

trying to keep us happy & warm.
Please realize that this is my goal too [. . .]

Maybe you will weary yourself on Big Bright Sun‘s endless waning summers, its spectrum of 70’s shag carpet colors (oranges and purples), its gardens and aviaries, its transcendent imminences, its incandescence, how pleased these poems can be by their own analogies and tropes, their flourishes, their long sentences staging grand productions crossing line breaks and the gulfs between stanzas on beautiful deus ex machina crescendos of “and ” and “&”, their reliance on the comforts afforded by the notion that experiences are “things,” enumerable, convertible. Me, I’m comfortable with how it all keeps me cozy in my awkwardness. And because Big Bright Sun hums and rumbles with so much that is, yes, good, the fan in me will be rooting for the fan in you to make your own big deal of its sounds and its sympathies, throbbing like the high numbers in a pair of good, clamping headphones, or the black light in that room that will always be yours.

So, like this someone calling to us out of Big Bright Sun‘s pages, let’s respond by resetting ourselves in sensation. Doing so is not giving into a siren’s song. Rather, its recognizing that some songs are living only for singing along.

I know the flowers will sing in the loud sunlight

& what they sing will sound so right it won’t matter if it is.

What are we joining? Since it is no use in injuring ourselves with speculations, let’s return to noticing these worlds whose lives don’t really need us, for maybe they aren’t all that indifferent. Maybe they just propose an attitude that we can’t name but, in our trying to describe it, can free us from needing ourselves.

How Often Do We Complicate Such Simple-seeming Things?

Mason Johnson’s Sad Robot Stories does a great job of, among other things, flipping the bird to conventional narrative and reader expectations. Mason’s humanization of his robot protagonist (protagobot?) skillfully navigates robot cliches and preconceptions and even dabbles with sexuality in a way that is not “shocking” but graceful and important.

While these stories are obviously interesting in their kind of kitschy existence, they remain important in other ways. Mason uses the perspective of the robot not in an attempt to bank on whatever quirkiness it instantly provides but as a very effective proponent of “outside-looking-in.” Dilemmas which are “so human” are examined by the inquisitive and heartbreakingly innocent perspective of the lead character and leave the reader wondering why employing this very clean and simple perspective seems so foreign.

How often do we complicate such simple-seeming things? Why do we take these emotions for granted? Items like sadness become so alluring and divine for the robot that readers are enveloped by contempt for their non-robotic selves.

This book is funny because as much as it is a tongue-in-cheek extravagance, it’s a beautiful work about the difficulty anyone has in feeling “human” or “loved.” The presentation — the crayon drawings, different reader paths, and comically minimal website — are tools that were created to augment the campy appeal, but I cannot imagine what could be less alluring than the best and most honest robot narrative I have experienced (sans Will Smith) in many, many years.

Sad Robot Stories is a free e-chapbook and can be downloaded at sadrobotstories.com.

The Once-Never-Before-Explored World of Ch*ck L*t

I don’t read chick lit.

I’m not sure I’ve ever done it once (though I did pretend to read Bridget Jones’s Diaryback in college just to have something to discuss with a girl I liked. It didn’t work out).

You know, I’m not even exactly sure if the term “chick lit” is derogatory or not. An epithet. I find myself saying “chick lit” in hushed tones when in the mixed company of people that might either read it and/or write it.

Then a friend of mine who reads it recommended a friend of hers who writes it and soon I was engrossed in Nancy Goodman’s new book Surprise Me!, my eyes opened to this once-never-before-explored world of ch*ck l*t.

OK, so Surprise Me! is indeed a novel about a woman — a chick — who struggles to find Mr. Right amongst three suitors. It has lots of short chapters and snappy pillow talk-type dialogue. Naturally, it has a bright pink wedding cake on its cover. Sounds like standard chick lit fare, right? But though it does have a light and breezy finding-love angle, in a way, that’s secondary to a story that is actually a lot more inventive and deep. It’s that story which I enjoyed most about the book and where it truly shined.

The novel’s protagonist Genie Burns, an incredibly compelling character, runs a company called Surprise Enterprises (with a partner and perhaps one of these aforementioned suitors), that plans surprise parties for people. Oh, if companies like Genie’s really existed, they’d make for a great reality TV show. The surprise parties Genie plans and throws throughout the narrative add a welcome dose of zaniness and humor to the book. More importantly, though, is the crux of Surprise Me! which is the detailing of Genie’s emotional eating issues and how she overcomes them.

Nancy Goodman herself is a former sufferer of emotional eating, food obsessions, and binging and has long wanted to help women overcome similar issues. Her first book was a serious self-help release on the matter, It Was Food vs. Me . . . And I Won, which despite a major publisher release never really latched on with the public. Still wanting to spread her message, Goodman figured an enjoyable chick lit novel might actually work better and came up with Surprise Me!

Now I may not really know chick lit, but I’m a sucker for books that seem breezy and lightweight upon first glance but are actually deep and inspiring at their core. In fact, that’s what I tried to do with my first novel How to Fail: The Self-Hurt Guide. But while my book was a seemingly “breezy and lightweight” offering full of promiscuous sex, voracious alcohol use, and lots of lots of foul language — masquerading a message of pursuing one’s unique dreams to find success and happiness in this world — Surprise Me! is a lot more, ahem, palatable for a general audience.

I’m a guy and while I read a lot of different things, I like “guy” books. Those are the kinds of books I write too. So I would seem to be one of the last people in the world who would fall in love with Surprise Me! Yet I did.

That’s the magic of it. Surprise Me! is not your typical chick lit. Even as I still don’t know if I’m allowed to use that term!

The Creation of a Girl: Lidia Yuknavitch's Dora

I have been waiting for Lidia Yuknavitch’s novel Dora: A Headcase since reading her memoir The Chronology of Water last year. In the memoir, Yuknavitch traces her journey from an abusive childhood and a troubled young adulthood to a middle age of acceptance, but above all, she rewrites what it means to be a woman and a girl in a culture that seeks to keep us silent. She gives voice to the corporeal experience that we girls and women are taught to shroud in shame. She locates creation and destruction in the body. She writes of her scars without flinching. She tells the stories that break the façade of the girl.

In Dora: A Headcase, Yuknavitch creates a girl who takes back her story. The character of Dora is based on the teenage girl at the center of Sigmund Freud’s 1905 case study on hysteria. Freud treated Ida Bauer, who he named Dora in the case study, for aphonia, the loss of voice. Despite her telling him otherwise, he attributes Dora’s hysteria to her unresolved sexual feelings for Herr K., a friend of the family who made advances towards her when she was fourteen. He also traces her symptoms to her repressed desires for her father and his lover Frau K., Herr K.’s wife. In the case study, Freud writes Dora’s story for her. In the novel, Yuknavitch gives Dora her voice.

Yuknavitch’s Dora is a seventeen-year-old punk teen in contemporary Seattle. She is on the cusp of adulthood, but adults treat her as a dependent minor without her own agency. She has suffered from bouts of aphonia after her father’s friend, Mr. K., propositioned when she was fourteen; he backed off only when she drew a pocketknife to her neck and cut a smile into her skin. Much to her frustration, she has yet to have sex. She faints when she becomes physically intimate with another, including her friend Obsidian, a girl from the Coeur d’Alene reservation with whom she is in love. With her posse of queer and misfit friends, she stages art attacks around Seattle. The adults consider these teen behaviors acting out, and Dora’s father sends her to the best shrink he thinks his money can buy, an elderly man she calls Dr. Sig.

“It’s not therapy. It’s epic Greek drama. You gotta study up. You got to bring game,” Dora says of her sessions with Sig. She knows that as a man in a position of authority, Sig has the power to tell her story over hers. And she knows that Sig views her problems through the lens of unresolved sexual issues. So she makes up outlandish dreams that hinge on objects that Sig thinks of as symbols of sexual repression. She likens the cracks on his office ceiling to vaginas. When he asks if she masturbates, she replies, “Do you?” and insists that he has to tell his intimate secrets before she will tell hers. She always carries a Dora the Explorer purse with her, modified with pins and skeletons. Inside the purse, she hides a recorder and tapes it all.

“I consider it my duty to beat Sig’s story of me,” Dora says. She wants to make a mix-tape of her sessions with Sig and snippets of punk music and play it at a rave. That is to say, she wants to recite Sig’s words in her own art. She wants to tell her story in her own voice. She knows that Sig is writing case studies of his patients. But she discovers that his publicist wants to turn the case studies, and in particular her story, into television for the money. Her pathologies would be broadcast on television for mass entertainment. Against her will, she would be portrayed as a “teen little monster girl,” a rebel bad girl who would serve as a catharsis and a warning for parents who believe in their right to absolute control over their children.

In her anger, she plots revenge. She makes a film instead. With the help of her posse, she sets up Sig and captures a horrifying, embarrassing, and absurd sequence involving his dick. She splices these scenes with images of the homeless, cuckoo clocks, nuclear explosions, humping buffaloes. “It’s a movie about everything. This world we live in. The bodies we’re stuck with. The lives we get whether we want them or not. How hard you have to work just to get through a fucking day without killing yourself.” To combat the invisibility of girls and women in the culture, she adds images of female artists who blew up the conventions of their media and made their own art. She considers the consequences of her actions, but she also says, “But you know what I think about more? I think about all the times in my life I didn’t understand what the fuck was happening and no one bothered to explain it to me.”

The plot of Dora: A Headcase is over the top. The pace is manic. It teeters between absurd comedy and the thrill of a chase. I often laughed out loud. Comedy in Dora is not just about entertainment; Yuknavitch uses farce to expose the hypocrisies of our institutions, in particular that of the family and its control over girls’ lives. Dora’s father suffers a heart attack. Her mother disappears to Vienna. At the same time, a raw cut of her film goes viral. Sleazy men stalk Dora and offer her money for her footage and when she refuses, their tactics become more violent. Amid all these traumas, Dora literally loses her voice. Her voice comes back to her as she defends the integrity of her art and her friendships. From the wreckage of her hijinks, Dora recreates herself. From the wreckage of her language, Yuknavitch creates a girl who demands, “I just want my stories to be mine.”

I Don't Cry Loudly, Nor Do I Cry for Very Long

Dear Joe,

I admit that travel, the departure and arrival associated with it, sometimes makes me weepy. If I cry, I usually cry on airplanes, most often during take-off and landing, and especially if I am reading a book. I cried on the flight home from Russia a few summers ago when I finished reading Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov. I cried on a flight to Houston last year — I was traveling on my own, was deliriously winging my way home to my wife — when I finished Stoner by John Williams. And I cried while reading your book on the flight out of Denver in the late winter of 2010.

I don’t cry loudly, nor do I cry for very long. I doubt any other passengers suspect my sadness. My wife has not noticed my occasionally crying on flights, and she usually sits next to me. No, instead, I tear up and flush red. My heart yank-yanks just a little bit harder. And yet, I feel embarrassed. There’s something about the modernity of travel, now, that discourages us from emoting. It’s very hard to feel normal when crying in the midst of hundreds of other people, each sitting still and forward, trapped in a miraculous tube at altitudes far beyond our comprehension.

No, I want to celebrate travel, distances, meridians, departure and arrival.  I want to celebrate the sadness of circumnavigation, and what better way to do so than to invoke the spirit of Antonio Pigafetta. What better way than to read of you and Cheryl, of your struggles to navigate 665 miles, the 665 miles between Indiana and D.C. To read:

. . . If prayers
are swift, deranged birds
I am letting them loose from the decks of my body

Look for them. Two years
& more promised, seven months

apart, what gifts are there
to give? A ring

To describe your finger or another book
in which to write what is your pleasure or

Dear Joe,

Hello? the tools to bind a book

& how much flesh is the book?
& how much bread is the book? 

If it is possible to enjoy the sadness of distance and extension, possible to share that joy of sadness with others, then too it is possible to realize that, in many cases, the anticipation of our arrival tempers such sadness, producing around it a relieving corona.

And outside, I see clouds passing beneath me.

Yours,

Ryan

There's No Time For Pleasantries, These Are Perilous Waters

The phrase “Don't Let Me Forget to Feed the Sharks” is a remarkable piece of advice that is entirely nonsensical. Then again, it is immediately necessary that such advice be given, due in no small part to its easy-to understand imperative. If that sounds like paradox, and if that's OK, then you're one step closer to learning the Dao. Which, of course, is something you'll never figure out.

Jeff Alessandrelli's Don't Let Me Forget to Feed the Sharks opens with an epigraph from The Book of Lieh-Tz'u, which a cursory Googling reveals as an ancient Daoist text. Speaking of Google, Google “wu wei” right now. You'll find yourself reading about how not trying to do anything is really the only way to get anything done, and you might postulate that becoming aware of said doing at any point in the process is a sure way to muck things up. What Alessandrelli is after here is effortless doing, and he'd better get it right because there is so very much at stake.

Thirteen of these twenty-five pages reiterate that “It Is Especially Dangerous To Be Conscious of Oneself” via a different poem of that title. They are formally distinct, but each poem is hyper-conscious of the self or something like it. Take anything from:

All morning long I've been walking
the plank and still haven't hit
water

to:

It's raining up ahead. Then it's pouring, simply pouring.”

In case you've forgotten, all that water is full of potentially hungry sharks. It is imperative that you remember to feed them. Provided, that is, that you remember and self-direct without self-consciousness, as engaging in self-consciousness is at least as dangerous as an un-fed shark.

I think it's in high school that the average reader is saddled with the unfortunate notion that the reading of a poem must culminate in some kind of aphoristic revelation. The trick to correctly reading a poem, then, is to figure it out. Alessandrelli's book begins with revelation:

I have found the secret
Of loving you
Always for the first time.

The speaker here is mistaken.

“The night is an expansive toy
no one can read the instructions to.

Poor Claudia did fantastic work in putting this book together. The binding is hand-sewn, the layout is eye-friendly, and the cover is an indispensable part of the experience. A swimmer in a red bodysuit, head-covering and all, floats or wades in stylized ink-line water, looking like he's forgotten something. The cover image is folded over the hand-sewn pamphlet on a finely-textured dust jacket.  It's an engaging package, and a fine book of poems to boot.

My hand-written number says I'm looking at number eleven out of one-hundred fifty. If you're into handsome books of fun poems, I highly recommend that you pick up one of these while there's still time.

But enough about that for now; there's no time for pleasantries. These are perilous waters.

The Big Lagowski: Savior of the World

Charles Bukowski freely decreed that after he turned 40 he stopped reading. Nothing was good, he said. Nothing was worth it anymore. I turned 43 recently and I have to admit, I had started to align myself with Hank’s controversial statement until I ran headfirst into Pat Pujolas’s wonderful book, Jimmy Lagowski Saves the World.

Due to personal preference, I don’t review collections of stories — I feel I’m much better suited at tackling longer works — but Pujolas’s acute, short pieces weave such a cohesive narrative of the human condition, that I can’t help but think of this as a protracted novel.

I am a sucker for starting off a book with some kind of a loud bang — a salvo fired above my head by the author announcing he or she is ready to eviscerate me: “Heads up, son . . . here it comes. Pay close attention now!” they say, and deliver a concussive propellant from their literary howitzer that nearly singes the hair on my head.  The first piece, “In Memoriam,” announces itself with this kind of ardor and static, and starts off a series of related taradiddles that follow the obtuse, curious twists of complicated, tragic, mostly broken lives in present day Midwest America.

Here you have Doreen, a 54-year-old divorced mother from Parma Heights, Ohio weighing her decision to board a bus chartered by her church group to a casino in West Virginia . . . as well as the choices she’s made in her life, and as a mother. There you have V., a retired maintenance man trying to confront his violent past while slowly descending into the madness brought on by his rising anger in a discount store checkout line. Julie’s first day at Starbucks is interrupted by a sudden, acute problem with a customer. Davis’s futile attempt at a seamless, night time bed routine with his three-year-old daughter while his wife is away parallels his failures and desperation in life. And then there’s Jimmy Lagowski himself: a badly burned, depressed, and possibly alien 20-year-old who casts the lone vote of dissension in a controversial murder trial.

These stories are all brilliant tableaux of real struggles and the sometimes paralyzing choices that pepper our daily, seemingly insignificant lives. Pujolas manages to channel the great, Modernist literature prose of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and Hemingway’s early Nick Adams stories. Dialogue is tight and sharp, and moves everything forward seamlessly. Hearing these characters speak, I found myself often thinking of David Mamet’s incising negotiations and palaver in Glengarry Glen Ross.

While I hate to go against one of my literary (anti)heroes, I can’t help but think that “reading life after 40” indeed gets better. There is good stuff out there. True, most of it lives in well-worn, handwritten notebooks that will likely never see the light of day, but from time to time the Literary Gods leak out some of their nectar and ambrosia to us mortals, and we are beatified with great, independent works like Pat Pujolas’s collection.